signs

“All opposites are in reality one thing, not two” – Mark Forstater, _The Tao_

“Reality, as Reality itself, has no opposite” – Neil Douglas Klotz, _The Sufi Book of Life_

“Reality…is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second. “  -- Richard Powers, _Plowing the Dark_

“No, dear, this is the dream.  You’re still in the cell.” – Monty Python skit that all the above quotes brought to mind

You keep walking past signs that you never read, says that quiet voice ever-so-casually from the hypnagogic world, just before it lets me wake.  Now if that isn’t a remark I oughta pay attention to…if only I can remember it long enough to wake up and write it down.  Why can’t those voices give me some kinda advance warning when they’re about to speak?  Countless other times they’ve rivered some profound message my way when I wasn’t close enough to consciousness to catch it, and could only watch it slip silvery away, trout-like, out of mind’s grasp…

And I'm trying to ponder the nature of Reality before I'm fully awake, and so, naturally, I get up thinking of an old Monty Python skit.  A guy is being tortured in a medieval dungeon, crying out in pain.  And then suddenly he wakes up in a lawn chair in an English country garden, with a woman handing him a glass of lemonade.  “Mum!” he cries out.  “I had the most horrible dream – I was being tortured…”  She interrupts him, in a sweet motherly voice.  “No dear, this is the dream.   You’re still in the cell.”  And the scene wavers again, and he goes back to being lashed with a whip, crying out…  Something of metaphor there?  Trying to wake up and can’t even tell when we’ve awakened?  Continuing to suffer, when we don’t have to fall back into sleep and dream?…I don’t know.  Maybe or maybe not.  But skit made me laugh.  With some kind of recognition.

All the other quotes are words I read just in the last week.  Talking about walking past signs.  They're everywhere.  And I know good and well that there's a Reality infinitely larger and more exuberant than ordinary perception allows for.  It's been courting me for years.  Flirting with me sleeping and waking, in words more than clear, and in voices I may never comprehend with anything more than startled wonder.  And sometimes, with gifts so straightforward I can't even see them.

But this morning does have room for consciousness.  This room in which I wake very literally is a room for consciousness.  Clean high ceilings, wide mountain-gazing windows, woodstove beaming clean warmth.  Beautiful stones and crystals color all the corners.  Singing bowls wait on a table.  This hand-built house, I just noticed while lying here staring at roof angles, is a seven-sided polygon.  Full of silence and spaciousness.  No clocks or electronics, no internet, no artificial interruptions that I don’t bring here with me.  I’m only here temporarily, and I see the gift of it.  I'm slowing down.  I’m listening.  Today I don’t invite any distractions.  I have attention to pay.  I want to see those signs.

Sun overhead moves slowly upward, reaches zenith in its own good time.  Or, it waits there for the earth, planet leaning slow and sure into their daily embrace.

Trees out on the hillslope grow at exactly their own speed.  Into their very own shape.  According to what water and earth feed them.  And what fire and drought don’t take away.

Stream down in the canyon follows only natural laws of supply and demand.  Takes what passage the channel opens for it.  Brings what abundance the higher places have given. Offers always what it has to give, no more and no less.

Fire burns at the rate of the life each log has accumulated.  Strong solid trees, some achingly still full of life when felled, release their substance only at their will.  Others seem weightless, glad to go.  For each, I mourn a moment.  Then give thanks, as they bring relief to my chill.

Yeast rises quicker with heat, but finds a slow way with even a little warmth.  Bread will bake just as well over hot coals as in an oven.  Which is nice, since there’s not a regular oven here.  Yes, I baked some beautiful bread over the coals left inside the woodstove.  Just because I could.  It tastes a little like a campfire, but I don’t mind.  Joyful at the extravagance of having the time to bake real bread.

Time for the real is there – here – just outside this worried tangle of everydays.  Dreams and wisdom flow always, just outside the daily construct.  Finding them is waking up from too much sleep and inertia, finally willing to meet the day.  For me, yes, it was waking from a recurring dream of suffering, into the dangerous peace of healing and freedom.  Now, today, it's turning off the radio (literal or otherwise) and stepping outside the house, down to the river’s edge (here, less literal but just as present:  Flow). Surging there, swift and deep and sometimes cold, Reality’s constant conduit.  Often these not-seen banks overflow, watering the fields that feed us, in response to need.  To the relief of soul’s drought.  Sometimes even in response to asking. 

THIS is the real world!  That other one, that hyperrushed people-confined construct is the false one.  Everything real moves at its own pace.  In its own balance.  In its own symmetric freedom.  In its own perfection of natural cause and effect.  Why in the world we always trying to push it, restrain it, change it? 

I'm stepping out of the house.  I'm kneeling at the river's edge.  I won't walk past this place in the usual blur.  My eyes are starting to focus.  I can read the signs.  Please.

juliebot(ched)

(A found-poem of output lines chosen from the "what would I say" app, which creates fake facebook posts based, apparently, on my real ones)

Oh, I´m so glad he´s got a huge former prison 
where I often stay, with the Earth

my friends who are building community 
leaders who represent lowincome neighborhoods, urban food initiatives
(faith that each of your wedding I went to)
keep silent about something different. 
Thanks for the inability of toys and Community service
We want them where they need for change, and mutual support
so maybe all of work, with that theme.
And to replace any suggestions
are adamant on building your utopias, too, right?
could use some help the real
any of you
I guess that's why the open frequency. 

Excuse me, says a piece written 10 years ago
seeds and they are constructed, with mine, 
at the right to Protect the Rights of life.
Carrots, snow peas, squash, brocolli, 
cilantro, garlic, nopal, and other adjustments. 
Hopefully I had spoken of the crop for the struggling,
and building something of that stresses me
I guess there used to be taking off, but also everything we might bring.

more or less, since we do remember
Have to how your life and know the rhythms of grace 
I'm gonna walk from elsewhere, 
a menos poder conocer el mundo, la clima, las cosas fueron impulsados
But I know a country, its parks as possible.

breakfast with 2 guys could move a supporter of same.

People still on the feeling go away, 

close to Earth at the frequency turned to
News...gets into the crater, hidden under the raindrops
if I weren´t already much involved in advance
free in close second, and just a quick summary
I have trouble seeing the world, and that out next week.
my fellow humans are leaving play
we have the need for sure.

Just in case any other shades of starts for day
dreams, or so Finally at dark, the mountains,
within the next for the Dark.
even here the phrase In the sun comes next.

Talk about here..A whole life has just listen to think about.
language, class, race with Sun,
another matter altogether. And there.
Vamos al fin del día, el rocío remoja, mi amiga 
and I LIVED that.

dream:path to refuge

All that we have to do is cross this forsaken city.  It seemed a simple undertaking, some time ago.  But with every grey and dreary new street that opens, each more desolately crowded than the last with the lifeless inhabitants of this place and their castoffs and contaminants, our goal has begun to feel impossible.

There are six or seven of us.  Sisters and brothers in the Order, bound by the journey, its long miles, and its urgency.  Our destination, whose clear image shimmers constantly in my mind's eye, is a spacious oasis enclosed in a pearlescent pink-gold geodesic dome.  It's the only shelter within reach of travel, the only unadulterated air, the last safe ground for miles.  The place has a name Latin in origin, which carries the essence of its power.  With as much intention as I carry the word, knowing that it means my hope of refuge, it does not stay with me.  There are only later vague efforts at approximation, which include "palladium"  "hypericum"  and "aeolium".  (Words which on investigation prove to be mineral, vegetable, elemental:  perhaps this place is ultimately pure archetype).  In the moment, I only know that there are many trees there, and water flowing, and the contrast of this greengold mirage to the wasteland of concrete and rubbish around me keeps my weary feet moving.

Our group has walked for miles, without a map, clinging to hope that we are closing the distance with our general trajectory.   On every side, massive stone walls shade the view a uniform white-grey.  Though the buildings appear ancient, the air is suffused with the same pallid color, as if granite dust were just now settling on every available surface.  There are no plants or trees to be seen anywhere. While the crowds around us don't appear to offer a direct threat, we're keeping our heads down, avoiding eye contact, just the same.  What we sense is a menace more unsettling for its intangibility.  To all appearances, the ashen citizens of this drab cityscape are not physically unwell; they seem to have simply lost their souls.  To have forgotten any connection to life and the living.  We slow our pace at another crushed intersection, the most distressing yet for its pathos of vacant-eyed people, heedless traffic, and animals wandering amid spoiled food and garbage.  To our left is what must have once been an elegant plaza, its marble statuary broken and splotched with bird droppings. On the corner, disturbing heavyset wild dogs fight over heaps of dead rodents and rotting meat as the walkers pick their way among them, apathetic, oblivious, their faces a grey approaching that of the stone.  The dogs become sick as they eat, then return from what they have disgorged to snarl and snap vicious teeth over more of the same.  I can only hope that the people fare better for food here, but so far there's not much evidence in support.  With gritted teeth, we squeeze past the gruesome scene, and under the momentary reprieve of a sagging sidewalk portal.  "Excellent!", exclaims a woman in our group, startling me with her buoyance.  "We've finally come to the crossing of two numbered streets.  We'll be able to catch a long-range transport from here."  But I am overwhelmed, leaden, and groan aloud with the critical mass of surrounding sadness:  "This spot is the worst of any yet!  I can't possibly stay here another moment.  Let me walk on, anywhere but here, and I'll catch up with you soon."  The others attempt to still my protests, reminding me of the impracticality of setting off alone, while I counter that, worst case, I'll find my way there by asking for the name of our safe haven, which I'll be sure not to forget.  Just then the woman who spoke earlier informs me that our expected wait for transport, an inconceivable half an hour, has already passed.  We raise our eyes for a sight of the transport that will at last take us out of this miserable place.

Suddenly, back on the plaza, a gigantic, magnificent slate-colored Percheron thunders across the stone.  Its impossible size is matched by its more-than-perfect muscular form.  Stray sun beams strike and richochet off its storm-cloud-dappled coat.  On its back rides a policeman in riot gear.  He is of normal size, but his mount lends him the illusion of mythical proportion.  Wan, ochre light glances off the face-shield of his helmet.  He does not brandish a weapon, or make a move of violence toward any, but something in the vision which he and the great horse present is a precipitant, an abrupt coalescing, of all of this city's stark, oppressive desolation captured in a single entity.  I am rooted, at once repulsed and longing to stare at the pair's brutal beauty. But the glimmer of foreboding solidifies:  we must move on, before we are too late.

Yet to accomplish the journey's next stage, it is vital that we concentrate and augment our own energies.  While the insensible crowds part and stream around us, we set our feet and stand, shoulder to shoulder, faces toward sun's dissipate, near-spent illumination.  Hands cupped in front of third chakra, the solar plexus, we call into reconnection.  Speaking the ancient words that affirm the all that is One and the One that is infinity, quietly at first and then with gathering potential.  My acute initial discomfort at unveiling these secret ways in public is replaced by a liberating wonder when, out of a current deeper than word or voice can track, a deep, honeyed hum of many invisible voices joins us, rich and resonant, flowing beneath our quiet speech and bearing it up, bearing witness to its vibrant continuity and community.  Unseen, atemporal, but potent and very present, this transcendant caravan swells us up on its surge of living memory and dream.  We are not alone or forgotten.  More than intuited or imagined, the voices become our transport, and dimensional space expands:  still the same impersonal city, and also a thousand welcoming ways opening simultaneously.  We don't see the road, but we are on it.  We will, be it at hope and vision's end, set weary feet on the last path to refuge.